Rob_G
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Posts posted by Rob_G
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One thing in 2.3 that also happens in 2.5 is where platform clear logos won't show while editing a view and a playlist is selected.
It does show once Big Box is loaded
Ro
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On 12/20/2022 at 2:43 PM, y2guru said:
ah ok, well let me know how you make out with the wheel item templates, no one has commented on using them yet and that was the lion share of version 2.5
At first I was lost on how to create a template. Then once I copied over the examples and saw what could be done, it looks really promising. It still took a while with making small edits in the template plus size and rotation changes in the theme for me to achieve the results I wanted.
Wall views are in my theme and highlighting the selected item is BIG improvement for those!
I used to have a grid overlaying the wheel to show favorite, broken and completed badges for the selected wheel item. Now I can actually have the badges as part of the wheel so they are always visible even when not the currently selected wheel item.
One last thing I want to incorporate is the idea of having switches in my theme so users can control things like whether fanart backgrounds are used or not. My solution is a bit kludgy, but simple also. But, I have to be careful to not have too much going on or I suppose performance will take a hit.
Rob
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I was toying around with the idea of allowing fanart backgrounds or not. It would be something the user can easily turn on/off completely.
I've included a sample image of the theme using fanart background. Looks ok right? But, not all games have fanart and the ones that do, not all of it is very good. Or it has a really high contrast which ruins the readability of the information card (second sample). Maybe if fanart is shown, the card has 100% opacity... Shrugs...
It was just something to try I guess. I'm not sure I will continue down this path.
Rob
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1 hour ago, y2guru said:
you have the selected item set to 150%
Yes, which is actually pretty good for 99% of the clear logos. It's the 1% that are oversized vertically that have an issue. If I reduce the 150%, then other clear logos look too small.
I will continue to play around with it and see what I can come up with.
Rob
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Maybe there could be a limiter for clear logo size on the wheel? The issue happens when there's the occasional oversized clear logo which looks too big on the wheel compared to everything else. Compensating by reducing sizes makes everything else look too small then.
I will also try different values to see if I can find something that works a bit better.
Rob
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On 11/23/2022 at 8:51 PM, darreldearth said:
Is there a way to get playlists to show custom art like the platforms do? Other themes let you so figured it might work, but When I place custom backgrounds, pointers, logos, and video boarders in their respective folders they don't do anything, and the only thing that shows up is the platform art which is the parent to the playlist.
Using the playlists because some platforms are broken down from "Sega mega Drive" into "sega genesis" and "Sega mega drive" playlists which each need seperate artwork
Any art you want to replace, like backgrounds, pointers etc must exactly match the name of the playlist and be in the correct folder. They also need to be PNG format, not JPG.
When artwork is not found, the _default.png is used.
Rob
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Openbor.... I gave it a shot, but the horribly buggy controls just ruined the experience. In the end, it seems like you have to use something like joy2key and map your controls to what the defaults are for the game. If you try changing the controls in the settings to what you want, things start to break. Since second player already defaults to joystick, I'm not sure how successful setting up a second player will be.
That's version 3... I'm not sure if version 4 alpha is worth investigating or not.
Rob
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Bezel configuration in RA is terrible I think. Also, the game overrides mess with hotkey functionality. It's been an issue for a long time and never been fixed.
Rob
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If that doesn't work, I also wrote a powershell script to remove and re-add game controllers in device manager. I constantly have this issue with my Arcade Legends Ultimate controls in OTG mode. They are almost always in the wrong order.
Rob
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Did you pair the wiimotes by bluetooth? I never got that to work properly. Maybe I needed a different bluetooth adapter for my PC.
Rob
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On 10/30/2022 at 12:33 PM, Trihy said:
Anyone got wiimotes working on hotd remake?
I can make 1 controller work using mouse emulation in touchmote. But 2 player is a no go.
Used the 2 player patch for sinden but when configuring pressing F1 and setting player 1 and 2 nothing happens. It says press trigger on controller but doesn't do anything.
The only one working for 2 player is using 360 emulated axis like pointer, but works pretty bad on this game.
I don't like touchmote because I think it's a wonky solution to try and use mode 4 with two touch motes and mame (for example). The software is no longer maintained too.
Ideally, you should have two dolphin bar, both in mode 2 and one touchmote paired to each bar. One of the bars is hidden so its lights don't show.
It could have been a great solution, but unfortunately there's no calibration software for the dolphin bar. Aiming at center screen is not pointing at the center of the screen, but directly at the dolphin bar. So that throws off the Y axis aim. The further back you stand, the better it is, but it's still not great. The above/below switch has no effect in mode 2. In game gun calibration for some games may make it better, but I haven't tried.
Rob
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More issues found with auto populate.
Setting auto populate to 'genre equals adventure' also includes games where the genre includes other tags like action for example. It appears to be impossible to include Adventure, but exclude Action. If you try, you don't get the results you want.
Are the results from auto populate permanently added to the playlist? That's a behavior I am seeing now. Which isn't ideal if you change the autopopulate fields because games that no longer match will still be in your playlist.
I guess until Launchbox has AND, OR, NOT in the auto filter, it's going to be rather limited.
Rob
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So I caved in and created a non auto populating playlist of co-op games. There's a few I need to remove because the got past my filter seach, but then I discovered if I try to use the remove game from playlist menu option, that doesn't remove the playlist (in BigBox)
edit: The game only appears removed after exiting and re-launching BigBox.
Rob
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I've been trying to create a playlist that will auto populate cooperative/simultaneous player games. I'm working in Launchbox.
At some point when auto populate is enabled and I've been using 'contains at least one of', the playlist will stop populating correctly. For example, it will show genre matching cooperative, but not simultaneous. If I change it to just show simultaneous, it still only shows genre matching cooperative. Exiting and reloading launchbox had no effect on making the playlist work correctly.
The only fix seems to be to turn off the auto populate then turn it back on. I don't use 'contains at least one of' any more - I think that is where the problem lies, but I am not sure.
It's too bad platform parent was not one of the criteria for auto populate. I have several Arcade game platforms under the platform category Arcade and I cannot easily make a playlist that includes games from all the child platforms within.
Rob
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Search for graphic media by google image searches. Then when you find what you want, it's just a question of creating your layout in CTC.
You may find more satisfaction and fun just by learning to do it yourself. It takes a while to figure things out, but once you do it's not too difficult.
Rob
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On 11/14/2022 at 11:00 AM, denmiclaw said:
Thanks for the response! Just speaking for myself, I think it looks better with how it's shown above, The card border itself was fine, I mainly wanted to see how it would look with the blue background transparent.
I agree, it was perhaps too much 'blue'. The transparency effect was originally created with a frame, but I have now removed that frame and added a glass transparency to the card image itself.
So the user can choose to use the card or not, with or without glass effect as well. Just manage the card.png file in the media folder.
Uploading 3.2 now.....
Rob
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A few thoughts... Maybe I will make it so if a person wants, they can just delete the card image and then the display will be as shown below. No frame opacity effect, just simple text.
Rob
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I added a wall view for the next upcoming version. I had to fix an issue in game horizontal view 3 where the box/disc images were not showing. I did it for fun and to see what it would look like.
If anyone has ideas about updating/replacing/improving the game information card, I'm all ears!
Rob
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On 11/1/2022 at 7:07 PM, denmiclaw said:
Just curious, but is it be possible to re-color/replace the blue background/image of the Game Details box? If so, where would I look for it?
Thank you!
You can replace or edit it. The file is in the folder "Launchbox\Themes\Unified Lives!\Media\MainMenu".
You would also have to edit 'Frame1' in the xml file to change the desired color opacity. I have sometimes thought about replacing the frame image, but I could never find anything else I liked. I spent many hours trying various configurations of images, colors, sizes etc.
What color did you want? Sorry for the late reply, I didn't see your message until now.
Rob
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Is there a version we can downgrade to that doesn't have this lag issue? It's really bad trying to scroll through my arcade games.
Rob
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17 hours ago, darreldearth said:
Looks great!
Thanks!
I am also overhauling two of the platform/playlist views into horizontal views as well, similar to the game views. They were too boring before.
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I have another update coming very soon. I completely revamped the video borders and ditched the pre-fabricated non-arcade ones. The theme will now dynamically recreate the original look, albeit maybe a little better and with more flexibility. This means slightly bigger device images and the main logo will be using the Platform clear logo. It makes non-arcade platforms consistent in design and view. And if you have the device png, just drop it into the devices folder with the rest of the device images and it will be displayed automatically.
All of the arcade video borders (an arcade cabinet) were left as is.
Rob
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Long overdue for an update. I had started a horizontal view format long ago, but never finished it. I decided to do that tonight and made 3 horizontal views.
Ha, I forgot to add favorite and broken icons to the new views. I'll fix that in a day or two, depending how motivated I am..
edit: Icons are added...
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Since the parent folder name is (probably) the name of the rom, I just wrote a bit of powershell to directly edit the platform xml file and replace the title information after importing the files. It's a bit kludgy, but it worked well.
Rob
COMMUNITY Theme Creator for BigBox 2.5 Evaluation
in Third-Party Applications and Plugins (Released)
Posted
Yes, I like it. I'm not going to get too fancy with it, but definitely the badge support is great!
I've now gone into a holding pattern for 2.5 release.
Rob